


when i am buried, at least i was married

by willowoftheriver



Series: empire (i'm building it with all i know) [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Aunt-Niece Relationship, Aunt/Niece Incest, Brother-Sister Relationships, Brother/Sister Incest, Domestic Violence, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, F/M, Female Jon Snow, Fire, Forced Marriage, Genderbending, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Infidelity, Minor Character Death, Pregnancy, R plus L equals J, Uncle/Niece Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 12:51:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7845790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes him years, but Viserys III Targaryen wakes a dragon.</p><p>(Or, fem!Jon Snow is discovered to be a Targaryen as a child, triggering an unfortunate marriage.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	when i am buried, at least i was married

**Author's Note:**

> I am just on a genderbending spiral anymore. Though this story has actually been in my mind for a while. I ship Jon/Dany hard, and Viserys is just such a *pretty* little scumbag, the possibilities were tempting. And I love any and all scenarios exploring what else could've happened to Jon, given R+L=J.

It comes to her very clearly in this moment that once, she’d been happy to marry Viserys Targaryen.

.

Once, she was a child and didn’t understand much of anything that was happening around her, just that suddenly, it was all different. Oh, Robb and Sansa and Arya were all still there, and they still lived in Winterfell just as they always had, but now people had started looking at her— _staring_ at her in a way that wasn’t anything like they used to. A lot of them bow to her now, and instead of calling her _bastard_ , they call her _Your Grace_. Though she doesn’t know what either really means, she grasps that the former is something bad, while the latter is something good.

Lady Stark is particularly different now. Instead of staring at her all the time in a way that makes Joanna feel very small, she can’t seem to look at her at all, and though she still doesn’t talk to her unless she has to, she did make a point of telling her that she was _sorry_ and _had just been so blind_. She lets her eat with them, too, all three meals.

The strangest thing is her lord father, though. He has tears in his eyes when he tells her that she could keep calling him father if she wishes, but that he isn’t. She isn’t really a Snow, or a Stark, but a _Targaryen_ , a name he says with a confusing amount of significance and one she can’t even correctly pronounce.

She doesn’t like that her father suddenly isn’t her father, but he assures her they _are_ , and always will be, blood. Then he takes her down into the dark depths of the crypts to see the statue of his lady sister, Lyanna.

After that, she finally has a mother with a face and a name that she can visit anytime she wants, and Ned Stark just being her uncle doesn’t seem so horrible anymore.

.

 

Winterfell had become much busier in those days. Her lord uncle spends most of his time locked away in meetings with the other Northern Lords, the likes of Rickard Karstark and Roose Bolton. The latter sometimes brings his sons with him, both the trueborn and the bastard. They buzz around her like flies, always trying to talk, always very nice— _too_ nice, especially Ramsay, who reminds her overmuch of what she finds unsettling in his father, even though she can’t name what it is.

Talk passes from person to person throughout the castle like a bad disease, no corner without a whisper. They say that someone in the south wants to kill the queen—and while she doesn’t know much of what a queen does or is, her uncle and aunt have told her that she _is_ one. She has a throne and a crown, though she’s never seen them, and she rules . . . something. Everything.

Her fath—uncle bows to her once. Gets down on one knee in front of everyone and swears himself to her. She’s wearing her best new dress, elaborate grey and black wool, and she can only stand there awkwardly, shrinking away from too many eyes as he promises to raise his banners in defense of her interests.

She doesn’t know what that means. (Robb doesn’t, either, when she asks him afterward, however much he tries to pretend he does.) So she just tells him softly that that’s good and to please, please stand up.

.

 

She sees, once, in the room where her uncle holds his meetings, an elaborate map set out on a table. She’s beginning to recognize the shape of Westeros, though the place names are still as indistinguishable to her as most other words.

Atop the map are little figurines scattered about in groups, beautifully carved into the shape of animal heads. She’s not sure about the stags, but she recognizes the direwolves instantly and makes a move to take one, only to have Lady Stark’s sharp voice from the doorway send her scurrying away.

.

 

The first clear memory she has of Viserys, he was sitting at a negotiating table arguing with her uncle about how he ought to be allowed to marry his sister, too. Ned Stark found this unacceptable, and Viserys found that unacceptable, and back and forth they went.

Joanna is too young to truly absorb any of this, of course. What she mainly cares about is what’s in front of her eyes, and Viserys keeps their gaze for a very long time. Her father’s brother has hair like she’s never seen, a pale moonlight blond, gold hued with silver, all of it spilling freely down past his shoulders. And his eyes, a soft purple she’s only perhaps ever seen before on flowers, set into a face that’s equal parts handsome and beautiful, even at his age. He seems otherworldly to her, maybe even _unnatural_ , and she can’t look away.

.

 

She’s happy when they’re betrothed. Proud, even, though that’s a very foreign feeling to her. (Sansa is jealous, and that makes her give a little, unkind smile she’s immediately ashamed of.)

. 

 

Her Aunt Daenerys is younger than her by a year, which makes it hard for her to call her _aunt_. They take to playing together, sometimes with Robb and Sansa and Arya, sometimes alone, but it always makes Dany very happy, as in Essos she didn’t have any companions her own age.

Looking back on it, it seems inevitable that Viserys would happen to stumble upon them that day when, in the midst of their dress-up game, Dany produced a beautiful, jeweled crown. She holds it with reverence, nearly worship, explaining that it had belonged to her mother as she puts it on Joanna’s head. It’s heavy, and far too big for her, but with some very careful positioning, Dany gets it to stay.

“My Queen,” Dany says with a giggle and a curtsy.

And for the first time, Joanna _does_ feel like a queen. For a few minutes, at least.

“That does not belong to you!” Viserys shrieks as he rips it off her head and brings it protectively to his chest. Her scalp stings everywhere all at once, only to be immediately muted as his hand flies into her face.

“My mother’s crown does not belong on the head of a half-breed, bastard mistake!” He pulls her hairs out of the crown’s metalwork and flicks them away, eyes sliding to Dany. “And you! What have I told you about waking the dragon, sweet sister?!”

Dany cowers, spluttering apologies as her eyes well with tears.

“You killed her,” he hisses, and presses on past her flinch: “You’d think you’d care more about what’s left of her.”

He turns and goes, and in the odd, muffled stillness left in his wake, Joanna cradles her cheek and feels a cold gaping dread open in the pit of her stomach for the first time.

.

 

She catches Viserys in the crypts once, standing before the statue of her mother. He glares at the stone as though he could wear it away just by his will.

“It’s all your fault,” he spits. “You northern whore. It’s _all_ your fault.” His voice cracks on the last few words, growing watery and weak.

He sinks to the ground with his arms around his legs, shuddering.

.

 

She lives in dread of flowering.

“Why did you bring him here?” she asks Ned one evening after she woke the dragon, her bruised arm hidden by a dress and resting limply on her lap. “Why are you making me marry him?”

“Oh, Joanna. I’m only trying to protect you.” He says it with so much _sincerity_ , so much love. “He brings Targaryen loyalists with him, and together you present a unified front for your House in the wake of—disaster, a King and Queen to rally behind.” And she hears the unsaid, that Viserys has silver-blond hair and purple eyes and looks like Royalists expect a Targaryen to look, which is nothing like her. “And Daenerys’s marriage with the Martells will secure us allies to the south.”

Joanna knows that the Martells hate her, in just the same way Viserys does. They hate Lannisters more, but she wonders what will happen when they’re all gone. _If_ they’re ever all gone. (At this point, it doesn’t seem possible. They’re more like cockroaches than lions.)

If nothing else, at least Viserys sometimes makes her forget that there’s an army that’s been fighting to get north for years, solely with the intention of killing her.

.

 

Daenerys doesn’t know much about Oberyn Martell save the negative—poison, whoring, bastard children.

“I’m repeating family history,” she says, staring off blankly across the courtyard at Bran as he toddles along, occasionally grasping at the stone walls. “The second Daenerys to marry in Dorne.”

Then she snaps her eyes to Joanna, a type of frantic, frenetic fire appearing in them. “I’d stay, you know. If I had any choice, I’d stay. Even once you . . .”

 _Even once you marry him. Not even he could make me leave_.

Joanna doesn’t think anyone has ever said anything that meant so much to her.

.

 

The Ironborn are always keen to the smell of blood. The cut down the center of the realm must’ve made Balon Greyjoy _salivate_ for a while, dream splendid dreams of a thousand saltwives and a crown on his head, his rule cutting a swath into the unstable areas until his empire covered more territory than the Ironborn had seen since the Conqueror.

Those crushed dreams of his prove more serendipitous to the Starks than anything. The Iron Islands have unexplored strategic potential against Lannisport, and even though Asha kicks Robb in the shin during their betrothal ceremony, his mother gently explains that his bruise bought them a fleet of ships.

.

  

When Joanna flowers, Daenerys hides her bloody underclothes away until she can take them far out into the night, through snow and wind until she’s in a place she knows no one will see her. Then she burns them and watches the flames dance amidst the falling flakes, mesmerized.

.

 

When she bathes, Dany always has the tub filled with steaming, boiling water straight from the fire, and Joanna has watched on more than one occasion as she immediately sinks down into it.

She cringes this time, but Dany just meets her eye with a challenge, beckoning her over. “You should try it.”

“I’m a Northman,” says Joanna. “I’ve never been that warm in my _life_.”

“You’re the blood of the dragon.” She holds her hand out, and it somehow manages to be very insistent all on its own.

“ _No_ ,” she says, only then she’s off-balance and tumbling, shoulder grinding in its socket as water rushes up to meet her. It goes over her head, her boggy nightgown billowing out from her legs as she halts her breathing and opens her eyes. They sting, and her lungs burn, and the steaming, rolling heat seeps through her skin, cutting her just as deep as any northern cold—but not _hurting_ , not _burning_.

She comes up in the next instant, gasping and spluttering, snorting water out of her nose. “Daenerys!” she shouts, outraged.

But Dany only smiles.

“The blood of the dragon,” she says again, and kisses her.

.

 

Joanna doesn’t cry at her wedding. Her uncle walks her to her groom, and she grasps Viserys’s hands and recites her vows in front of the Weirwood Tree, and a cloak bearing a wolf and a dragon intertwined is traded for one with the three-headed sigil of House Targaryen.

She dances at the reception. Daenerys looks at her anxiously from across the room. The bedding is called.

And Joanna tries her best to not feel anything at all.

.

 

When she’s in her seventh month of pregnancy, Viserys lays his head on her stomach and listens, eyes wide, hands loose around her hips.

“We’ll name him Rhaegar,” he says.

She tries not to be overly tense, to force just a little smile. “What if it’s a girl?”

“Rhaella,” he answers immediately. “One day, they’ll sit the Iron Throne, niece. I’ll add the swords of the Baratheons and the Lannisters to it, and my heir will sit on it in a crown more glorious than any before it. They’ll rule from the bottom of Dorne to the top of this icy hellhole. And Essos! The _free men_ who saw fit to abandon us in our darkest hour. We’ll take them in fire and blood. Fire and blood.”

He murmurs to her womb again and again, and that night she dreams of it—ice and fire entwined inside of her, pushing through her blood, engulfing her child. Rusted blades press into her back and arms, and all is seared away until she rules a realm of snow and ash.

.

 

She doesn’t wake the dragon because she bears a girl. Rather, it’s because the girl has black hair.

“But purple eyes, my King,” she tries.

It doesn’t do any good.

.

 

Sometimes, as Joanna sits in her chambers holding Rhaenerys, Daenerys puts her hand in the fireplace and plays with the flames as though they were air.

It makes the baby laugh.

.

 

Robert Baratheon tries to have them all killed numerous times, of course.

On one occasion, as the assassin chokes on his own blood and Dany clutches Rhaenerys to her breast, Joanna looks hard at Viserys laughing in self satisfied glee and is struck with such a bone deep loathing that she wishes that next time, the guards would be less vigilant.

It’s a cowardly thought, unbecoming and pathetic. Kinslaying is heinous enough, but to hide behind deceit rather than accept the shame?

No. If she ever kills Viserys, it will be by her own hand. All judges must carry the weight of the sentence they pass.

.

 

The only times Viserys and Theon get along are when they go out to indulge in their two shared interests—drinking and whoring.

Joanna finds herself amazingly grateful to Theon when that happens. Those nights, she crawls beneath the covers with Daenerys and thinks, amidst her soft arms and kisses, that this is her true marital bed.

.

 

Viserys goes out with Ramsay Snow only once.

He comes back the next morning with a faraway look in his glazed-over lilac eyes and his skin tinged an unnatural color that clashes badly with his hair.

He never tells her, or anyone, what happened—maybe for the best, because she’s heard the rumors about the Bastard of Bolton, nearly _everyone_ has. He just has Ramsay’s entire kennel starved for a week, and then feeds them their master.

.

 

That she breaks her arm shortly after giving birth to another black haired girl is a coincidence, she says. An accident.

She nurses Rhaeherys in her chambers with Daenerys at her bedside and Rhaenerys at the hearth, coasting her hand dangerously close to the flames.

“At least Maester Luwin says you should regain all the function,” Dany says with a tight-lipped smile that does nothing to hide the rage.

Lately, Dany has been rarely anything _but_ angry. It’s developed in her over time, with every bruise, every cruel word, every time either of them has woken the dragon.

She still flinches, but now the heat grows in intensity each time she has to.

.

 

She finally gives birth to a blonde haired, purple eyed Rhaella, and Viserys is in a very good mood. This increases into full on _cheerfulness_ when news comes of the Usurper’s inauspicious death in a drunken hunting accident, and when Stannis Baratheon accuses his three trueborn children of being bastards born of Lannister incest? He chastely kisses Daenerys on the cheek, twirls Joanna around the room, and hugs each daughter in turn.

“Your birth has heralded great things,” he murmurs to Rhaella that night in the nursery, the moonlight flooding the room and giving them both identical halos. It’s one of the handful of times Joanna has ever seen him genuinely smile.

In the morning, she finds her grandmother’s crown hung on one of the posts of the crib.

.

 

Daenerys says that Joffrey doesn’t have a surname, being an unacknowledged bastard. Not a Waters, not a Hill, just nothing.

Viserys calls him a whoreson, and has tongues cut out when whispers begin that he’s a second Mad King, far more like a raving lunatic Targaryen than anything else.

Viserys seems very happy with himself when he takes her to see all the rotting little muscles nailed to the wall. (He never orders them taken down, however strong the stench becomes.)

.

 

When Tyrion Lannister arrives, bloodied and filthy, a kingslayer and a kinslayer both, Viserys’s first inclination is to have his head on a pike. The others, however, see . . . _opportunities_. Lannister blood coursing through a brain that won the Battle of Blackwater Bay, a claim to Casterly Rock that well overrides Cersei’s, a man who cut off the head of the lion when he shot Tywin Lannister through the heart. King’s Landing is in the control of a whore and a prepubescent puppet, all thanks to him, and whoever gives him a son will have the key to the west in her belly.

Sansa’s eyes are wet when her groom has to stand on a stepstool to put the cloak around her shoulders, and they dart to her mother again and again as though she could save her.

Viserys doesn’t bother to stifle his chuckles.

.

 

Dinner rarely goes well. That this is the modest feast for Sansa’s seventeenth nameday ensures it won’t.

Viserys starts out holding Rhaella on his lap and doing nothing more offensive than complaining about the dwindling quality of the food. _Winter is coming_ , as they’re all well reminded, and as the snows have increased in ferocity and the chill pervaded every inch of the castle, game has become just as scarce as crops.

Viserys feeds her a few little, well-chopped bits of their peasant’s food, unseasoned potatoes and cabbage and rabbit. She eats well for a while, smiling and trying to say _Sansa_ , but as she gets tired, her periwinkle eyes fill with tears and she starts sniffling. Viserys hands her off in irritation to her nursemaid and shoos them away.

They leave the hall promptly, followed shortly by Osha with her and Theon’s bastard in her arms. The wildling woman has never adapted well to many of the conventions below the Wall, and Joanna sometimes finds herself wishing she’d have stayed far beyond it, fighting the _Others_ she swears lurk there. Then Theon wouldn’t have started to stay in so many nights.

Rhaenerys and Rhaeherys watch her go longingly, but they don’t ask to leave. (They never ask their father for much of anything. Rarely speak to him, unless they have to.)

In Rhaella’s absence, Viserys picks up his wine glass and drains it in one go, turning to engage Lord Stark in a conversation that has the man looking as though he’s navigating a battlefield.

Viserys’s cupbearer returns several times, and somewhere around the fourth iteration, he raises his glass in Sansa’s general direction to toast her birth, then immediately begins to lewdly speculate about the mechanics of how she came to be with child, given Tyrion’s stature.

Sansa sits staring fixedly at her plate, red with humiliation. She daren’t say a word. (It had truly been a miracle on the part of Lord and Lady Stark those months ago to talk Viserys out of reinstating First Night, the reasoning that her child must unquestionably be a trueborn Lannister somehow getting through to him. Her terror has been palpable ever since.)

Viserys seems oblivious to the tension at the table as it builds—or perhaps it’s just the reverse; perhaps he’s _gleefully aware_.

Tyrion remains stonefaced for a long while, nearly unblinking. Insults wash over him like water, but as Sansa crumples more and more, his shoulders grow tenser.

And ultimately, the problem with Tyrion Lannister is that he has a very vicious tongue he occasionally does not control as well as he should.

Viserys sneers hatefully, audacious enough to be offended, and throws his goblet at Tyrion’s face. It hits with enough force to snap his head back and bounces to the floor, rolling beneath the table.

“Pick it up!” he demands, though when Tyrion moves to do so, he slams his hand to the table. “Not _you_ , Imp. _You_.”

Sansa gathers the tatters of her dignity around her and prepares to try, one hand on her awkwardly large belly, but then Daenerys is there, pushing her back into her seat. She ducks beneath the table and gets the goblet herself, setting it down in front of her brother with a loud thunk.

“Did I tell you that you could do that in her place, sister?” he asks her quietly.

“No,” she says simply. Daenerys rarely does anything right in her brother’s eyes, however cautiously she obeys. Though there’s a faint tremble in her legs, she doesn’t back away this time—doesn’t even lower her eyes.

He backhands her across the face in the next instant, hard enough to send her crashing into the side of the table. Sansa gasps in horror and Robb and Arya jump to their feet, while Lord and Lady Stark begin attempting platitudes, anything to diffuse the situation.

Only then, Daenerys does something new.

For a second, she eyes him through the scattered strands of her hair. And she hits him back.

The expression on his face is one Joanna has never seen before. For the first time, he truly _does_ look a dragon.

It makes her rush to put herself between them, to push Dany back as he raises his hands to grab her.

“My King,” she begins desperately, “My husband, please—”

“Shut up!” he roars. “This is no concern of yours, bitch!”

“She did not mean to—”

He rips her forward by her hair. “How sweet of my unnatural whore wife to protect the cunt she so loves.”

Denials spring automatically to her tongue.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything else. You must’ve inherited your perversion from your mother. One slut does beget another, after all.”

All of her words stick in the back of her throat, coming out as nothing more than a gag. For years, they’ve all said she’s very like her father Rhaegar, sullen and quiet, lacking the Targaryen temperament. But now anger has snapped to light somewhere deep in her chest, scorching the ice from her veins, and she can’t help but say something extraordinarily _unwise_.

“I fuck your sister just as much as you do, my King husband. Except I don’t have to rape her each time I do.” 

.

 

And that’s how she finds herself here, in this moment. The flames dance in the cup in front of her, blackening the metal, reddening the palms of her hands.

She remembers the lessons of her family that she so enjoyed when she was young, all the lives dictated by the flip of the gods’ coin, madness or greatness or some amorphous point between. The Aegons, from the Conqueror to the Unworthy and his bastards, Baelor and his sisters, Elaena and the life she led after the Maidenvault, Jaehaerys the Good, Rhaenyra’s war and the first two Viseryses. Visenya, whose name she would’ve borne in a different life.

Aerion. Cruel, insane as any before or after him, a monster who thought he was a dragon and died screaming with a mouthful of Wildfire.

It’s not Wildfire in this cup in her hands, just wine set alight, burning with orange flames. She supposes it hardly matters one way or another when it’s going to be going down her throat.

“Drink it!” Viserys demands again. He has Daenerys by her hair and her chin, forcing her to look. “Drink it and see what flames do to a half-breed nothing who dares to claim to be a dragon!”

Rhaenerys and Rhaeherys are sobbing, Sansa clutching them to her sides. The guards have swords on Robb and Arya and Lord Stark and even the Greyjoys and Tyrion where they all stand at the table, poised to move, to do something, _anything_.

Joanna can’t let herself give them the chance.

Once, she’d been happy to marry Viserys Targaryen. Now, if she dies screaming right here, a hideous death as the flames hollow her from the inside out, she thinks that she’ll be happy just to escape him.

She raises the cup to her lips and swallows again and again and again, eyes squeezed shut. She tries to disconnect from her mouth in the same way as when she takes bitter medicine, to retreat from the heat and the flames tinged with the flavor of wine as a trail is blazed past her lungs and her heart.

The cup falls from her hands, the sound of it hitting the stone drowned out by the rushing in her ears. Everything seems to stutter—her heartbeat, her breathing, her thoughts and vision and blood.

And she’s fine. She’s warm, and she’s not screaming, and she’s fine.

“Fire cannot kill a dragon,” Dany whispers into the absolute breathless silence of the room. Then she rips herself from Viserys’s grasp and shrieks it: “ _Fire cannot kill a dragon!_ ”

As the hall explodes with noise, whispers and amazed shouts and praise to the daughter of Rhaegar, Joanna looks up at Viserys, meets his eyes.

And she can tell: he’s _afraid_. He knows she’s _won_.

She tilts her head high and leaves, Daenerys at her side and her daughters clinging to her skirts. For the first time in years, she’s smiling.

Yes, they will have their Rhaegar. Soon, she feels. And when she has a son at her breast and an army that calls her _Dragon_ , she doesn’t know how much longer Viserys’s crownless reign will last.

Only that it will be short.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually really like Viserys as a character. I mean, he's a lot like Joffrey, but I feel there was some potential for depth there that Joffrey didn't have. Viserys obviously inherited the Targaryen madness, but he'd also been through a lot of shit and was probably more broken and twisted than anything. He just didn't have the strength of character to overcome any of what he'd been through.
> 
> *ahem* So here's my stupid fic that does no justice to that or any other character. I think I just had a hankering for Jon/Daenerys femslash.
> 
> Title comes from the song "Marry Me" by Emilie Autumn.
> 
> -Annastasia


End file.
